I just finished one last week, I have to get my bosses approval to relase it
though.
Joe
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Johnson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, February 11, 1999 10:33 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Tarpitting
>
>
> There was some discussion a while back about tarpitting. If you
> don't know what
> that is (I didn't when it first came up), it's the process of
> inserting a small
> sleep in an SMTP session for each RCPT TO after some set number
> of RCPT TOs.
> The idea is to thwart spammers who would hand your SMTP server a
> single message
> with a long list of RCPT TOs.
>
> The subject originally came up in a discussion of ways to run an
> open relay
> safely (I didn't suggest it, and I don't do that kind of thing),
> but it could
> also be useful in keeping your own dial-up customers from using
> you as a spam
> relay.
>
> I've made a simple patch to qmail-smtpd to allow it to do
> tarpitting. There are
> two control files involved: control/tarpitcount and control/tarpitdelay.
> tarpitcount is the number of RCPT TOs you accept before you start
> tarpitting,
> and tarpitdelay is the number of seconds of delay to introduce after each
> message. tarpitcount defaults to 0 (which means no tarpitting),
> and tarpitdelay
> defaults to 5. If NOTARPIT is set in the environment (perhaps by
> tcpserver)
> then no tarpitting is done. (I had considered doing this the other way
> around--no tarpitting would be done unless TARPIT was set, irrespective of
> control/tarpitcount. Any suggestions on this point?)
>
> If anyone is interested, it's at
> http://www.palomine.net/qmail/tarpit.patch.
> I'm not vouching for
> the effectiveness of doing tarpitting or whether it's a
> good thing to do to your customers, but there was some interest
> in it, so there
> it is.
>
> Chris
>
